Peterson: Dividing and conquering in 1967

One rainy night in 1967, a few other grad students and I divided up the world.

We were very smart — you could’ve asked any of us.

One of us ran away to Canada; I went to ’Nam; someone received a 4-F. And the others? I can’t remember.

Our project began modestly enough.

Taking off on Barry Goldwater’s suggestion that the Eastern Seaboard be cut off and set adrift, we agreed that we’d be better off if certain parts of the country were underwater.

So off we went.

We sank the South except for Virginia, Kentucky, New Orleans and Charleston. Sorry; most of us had barely heard of Savannah.

Next we solved the nation’s urban crisis by sinking Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Boston. The only surviving metropolis was San Francisco.

But we sank most of California south of Fresno — which Walt insisted on saving — but generously provided that worthwhile remnants could find refuge on the state’s Channel Islands.

Washington, Oregon and the Rocky Mountains states remained intact, but Nevada and New Mexico were deep-sixed.

We deal harshly with the Midwest. The only survivors: Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin and the Dakotas.

Next, we turned east, placing Maryland on conduct probation, and sinking West Virginia, Connecticut and all but upstate New York.

Giddy with our success in the continental U.S. — somehow we overlooked the rest — we turned to the remainder of the world.

We ended the Vietnam War by sinking the country and eliminated China as a target for greedy Western imperialism by submerging it, too.

We dealt with India, Pakistan, Malaysia, Burma and Thailand similarly, but let the good stuff in the area be placed on what then was called Ceylon; it’s Sri Lanka these days. Japan received conduct probation.

We also decided that Africa also had been a target of imperialism for too long, so we sank all of it but Upper Volta, Ethiopia, Malagasy Republic and what was then Rhodesia, which also was put on conduct probation.

Similarly, we declared that the Middle East had been a problem for far too long, so all but Israel and Lebanon went to the bottom.

By then, we had to solve our own growing identity crisis, in as much as there increasingly was little with which to identify.

That left me the throne of the U.K., which I accepted along with Australia, New Zealand, some islands and the recalcitrant Rhodesians.

About then, two other grad students arrived and — in short order — threatened to have us committed. We bought off Steve by ceding him what was left of the Western Hemisphere but scuttled all of Latin America except for the ABC countries and the Yucatán Peninsula.

We gave Terry a hodgepodge: Ceylon, Japan, Mongolia, Indonesia, Afghanistan, the Malagasy Republic and Upper Volta.

In exchange for giving Jim concessions in the Baltic — cold-water ports are the next best thing to warm-water ports — Walt got to sink Bulgaria and become protector of the Armenians, including those in Fresno.

We never got around to Scandinavia, but we eliminated Poland as a cause of enmity between the Russian and Austrian empires by converting it to the Polish Sea. Germany was converted to farmland and France remained an independent country. I became Protector of the Lowlands.

The War That Ended All Wars came over something silly. I wanted Ireland. Walt and Jim balked. I countered with the modest proposal that all of Ireland but Ulster become an island in the Polish Sea.

Hell, no, they said, ordering me to surrender to their protection both Edmund Burke and James Joyce. I yielded Joyce, but clung to Burke like a security blanket.

We were at an impasse, and it meant war.

The British Navy sprung into action, only to be set upon by giant balrogs — fresh out of whatever volume it was in the Tolkien trilogy.

But in a war that ends all wars, there are no winners.

We all went glub, glub, glub.

As he descended into the deep, Murray disassociated himself from the project, gasping that the world wasn’t a very good place, anyway.